Movement magazine issue 154

INTERVIEW
STEVE CHALKE
Revd Steve Chalke MBE is a Baptist minister and founder of Oasis
UK, a charity committed to transforming communities by working
in an inclusive, integrated, empowering and comprehensive way so
that all people experience wholeness and fullness of life. He is also
the Founder and Chair of STOP THE TRAFFIK, a global coalition
of organisations working to end human trafficking. Holder of the
Guinness World Record for the most money raised by a marathon
runner, Steve lives in London with his wife Cornelia, where he acts as
the Senior Leader of Oasis Church Waterloo.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your spiritual journey. I’m Anglo-Indian, and
the first of four kids. Dad was from South India and was very dark skinned, so
I was the darkest skinned kid I knew. I grew up in a home that was very poor,
a home where I knew what it was like to face discrimination. My mum’s family
totally disagreed with the fact that she’d married someone who was effectively
a black man, and I think that that had quite a lot of a shaping effect on my life.
I became a Christian in secondary school. I liked a girl called Mary from the
school down the road, and I started going to a church youth club just to see her.
I’d been going for weeks and weeks and one Friday night my best friend told me
that Mary didn’t fancy me, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to
me! As I wandered home that night I was contemplating my future without Mary,
a life that was meaningless and all that kind of thing - as you do when you’re 14
- and it was all very depressing. And then I thought, ‘what they tell me about who
I am at this church youth club is a lot better than who they tell me I am at school,
where they tell us we’re riff raff and will never amount to anything, that I’m going
to work with my hands not my head, that I’m not worth educating and won’t pass
any exams. At the church they tell me my life is crammed with meaning and that
I am made by God, in his image, and my life has huge potential’. I remember
thinking, ‘I might be stupid, but I’m not that stupid, I’m going to choose the
church’s story over the school’s story, and I’m going to keep going to the youth
club whether Mary fancies me or not!’
On the rest of the journey home, I decided that if I was going to be a Christian, I
was going to do it 100%, and that I would tell other people this incredible story
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